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Your questions: what do I like about Windows 7? Hardware home pages with Device Stage

Picture of Device Stage for a mobile phoneJohn Swenson has an interesting article covering Device Stage in Windows 7, as he describes as "a home page for select compatible devices and printers. It’s a simpler and faster way of finding and using your devices with Windows."

"You don’t have to be a gadget geek to know that it can be hard to get a mobile phone, music player, or other device to work smoothly with your computer. How do you sync contacts and appointments to your mobile phone? How do you get music onto your portable music player? Where do you find the manual for your device, software updates, and help? The list can go on and on, depending on the device.

"Enter Device Stage. This new feature in Windows 7 solves these problems by gathering everything you can do with your device into a single window, making tasks easier to find and complete."

In Device Stage, you can view more information about a connected device and see its status from battery life to storage capacity, sync setup, links to manufacturer information (like support) and more.

To get an idea of where the concept for Device Stage came from, take a look at this WinHEC presentation form our Dennis Flanagan in Windows. In it, he covered some of the challenges of dealing with a number of different devices in Windows Vista.

One of the nice things about the hardware ecosystem support for older devices is what we’ve noted as a "baseline" experience in Device Stage, which the team covered here on the E7 blog earlier this year…

"This UX works exactly like full Device Stage; the device image appears on the taskbar whenever it is connected and tasks are exposed in the Jump List. On first connect, the shell Window containing all of the built-in tasks appears automatically and is always just one click away from the desktop icon or device image in the Devices and Printers folder. When the device maker implements a custom Device Stage experience for a device, it gets posted on the Web and the baseline experience gets upgraded when the device is later reconnected. The core functionality is the same, but all of the branding, imaging and vendor-specific tasks are now available automatically in the same convenient UI."

Tags: Windows 7, hardware, device stage, Windows 7

Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse, Challenge-Windows 7, hardware, Windows 7, Device Stage

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Get ready: New Acer Aspire Windows Home Server appears on Amazon in the States

Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Home ServerOK, geek moment before the start of the long weekend here in the States. I’m very excited as the new Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Windows Home Server is outfitted with 2GB of memory and a 1 TB Hard Drive, leaving 3 open slots for additional hard drives to be easily added. 


Full specs (thanks, Mark):


Acer Aspire easyStore AH340-UA230N Home Server:  Available now for a MSRP of $399.99



  • Intel® Atom™ Processor 230 (1.6GHz)

  • Microsoft® Windows® Home Server

  • 2GB DDR2 Memory

  • 1TB Hard Drive

  • Three Empty Hot Swappable Hard Drive Bays

  • Five USB 2.0 Ports

  • One eSATA Port

  • 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet

  • 200 Watt Power Supply

  • RJ-45 LAN Port

More on Amazon at http://bit.ly/xp3NJ


Oh, and did I mention that it’s basically a cube? I like the design.


 


Tags: announcements, Home Server.


Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse, Windows, Home Server



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The latest Microsoft “Laptop Hunters” commercial: “I’m a PC and I got exactly what I wanted.”

There’s a new Laptop Hunters "You find it, you keep it" Microsoft PC television commercial out with Lauren (a new law school student) and Sue (her mom)…

<br /><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=0170090f-53b2-40fc-89a4-c759cb088e0a" target="_new" title="Laptop Hunters $1700 – Lauren and Sue get a Dell XPS 13" rel="noopener noreferrer">Video: Laptop Hunters $1700 – Lauren and Sue get a Dell XPS 13</a>

 

Tags: articles, what I read, I’m a PC, Microsoft, Windows.

Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse, Windows Vista, video, laptops

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Windows 7 Release Candidate now available, with more info on what’s new in the RC, MED-V, and improved SSD support

Windows 7 Release Candidate Takes the StageLots of news today (as noted in the news today) on the availability of the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC). Remember, only download the Windows 7 RC from a trusted source – via Microsoft – to save yourself the security risk.

As noted on MSDN and TechNet, the RC is an opportunity for enthusiasts, IT professionals, developers and folks like you to take the OS for a spin and test it a real world environment. With the Microsoft Windows 7 Compatibility Center site now live, you can also get more help with devices and applications on Windows 7 as noted here (from my Twitter post).

Stephen Rose – Sr Community Manager – Windows Client IT Pro put together a video for the Springboard site on what some of the new features in the Windows 7 Release Candidate area. You can find it in his post "Want to learn what’s new in the Windows 7 RC?" and view it here, too.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:9bbba6ce-394b-4cdf-9780-aaa52d7d77e1&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="What&#39;s New in the Windows 7 RC" rel="noopener noreferrer">Video: What&#39;s New in the Windows 7 RC</a>

You can also read more about Windows 7 Pro & Windows XP Mode in the Q&A with Scott Woodgate as he discusses the new Windows XP Mode with Virtual PC and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V).

As noted by Microsoft_Gov, Windows 7 RC will have 13-Month Life Span, and PC users can run it until June 1, 2010.

Elinor Mills of CNETNews offers a quick look at some of the security enhancements in Windows 7, with mentions of DirectAccess and BitLocker To Go. 

And a personal favourite story of mine today, from the Engineering Windows 7 blog courtesy of Michael Fortin, is the Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives (aka SSDs, also as picked up in Tom’s Hardware WRT optimization for Solid State Drives).

Around the office, many of us have been particularly interested in the features in Windows 7 to reduce writes. The article is a good read and be sure to check out the frequently asked questions: I read it with interest as I build a new Windows 7 Media Center PC (details to come) which has a 60GB SSD at its heart coupled with a low power WD Green drive for content storage. Prices are getting quite affordable for good sized SSDs (I’ve looked at 30-128GB drives and settled on a performance 60GB model) and reliability is higher than ever.

"Many of today’s Solid State Drives (SSDs) offer the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices dropping precipitously, most analysts expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating hard disk drives (HDDs).

"In Windows 7, we’ve focused a number of our engineering efforts with SSD operating characteristics in mind. As a result, Windows 7’s default behavior is to operate efficiently on SSDs without requiring any customer intervention. Before delving into how Windows 7’s behavior is automatically tuned to work efficiently on SSDs, a brief overview of SSD operating characteristics is warranted.

"… we believe the future of SSDs in mobile and desktop PCs (as well as enterprise servers) looks very bright to us. SSDs can deliver on the promise of improved performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions. With prices steadily dropping and quality on the rise, we expect more and more PCs to be sold with SSDs in place of traditional rotating HDDs. With that in mind, we focused an appropriate amount of our engineering efforts towards insuring Windows 7 users have great experiences on SSDs."

Tags: articles, blogs, Windows 7.

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Thinking about preparing for Windows 7? I’m thinking it’s time for a new hard disk

Hard DiskSitting through lunch today between meetings and mail, I thought about what every self-respecting geek waiting for the release of Windows 7: what should I do in order to prep one of my older computers for this new OS? 


Today, I thought I’d start with one upgrade to consider (and a point of failure I’d like to avoid): a new hard disk for my laptop. 


Keeping in mind that as noted here (that the Beta will stop working on August 1, 2009), I intend to rely on my dual boot configuration for Windows 7 to fall back to Vista and then move to the RC… and ultimately to the release version of Win7 from Windows Vista. (I used this strategy for machines at home, as mentioned in my later post from the article “How To Dual Boot Vista and Windows 7″ from NetworkWorld.)


To continue using your PC, please be prepared to reinstall a prior version of Windows or a subsequent release of Windows 7 before the expiration date. You won’t be able to upgrade from the Beta to the final retail version of Windows 7.


Luckily, Jason Cross over at ExtremeTech obliges with his article, How To Upgrade Your Laptop Hard Drive, in which he steps through the how-to of moving the contents of your current hard drive over to a new one, likely larger given the incredible value per GB these days.


Considering the drive in our now out of warranty Dell Inspiron m600 successfully running on Windows Vista SP1 – even more so my so-called revitalized Notebook (Toshiba M200) – I think that I have the perfect candidates for new HDDs. With 1GB of memory on the notebooks already, the major upgrade investment for me is the HDD… and a good value considering a new 250GB drive will run you as little as $60. (I still remember fondly by original 20MB drive that I paid a small fortune for a then-new Mac Plus.)


If I had to consider the work needed to upgrade an old notebook, I’d probably buy a new computer given the cost of PC notebooks these days (never mind small notebook PCs for a moment). As I found in my post Me : “What kind of a computer should I buy?” for $679, I was able to get a new Sony with a 15″ widescreen, Intel Core 2 Duo T5800, 250GB HDD, 4GB of memory, Wireless-N (draft 802.11n). We will upgrade this computer to Windows 7 as soon as it comes out on the market – it’s the one PC at home (my wife’s) we have not installed the Windows 7 beta for obvious reasons to husband/family IT Pros. 😉


In the example below, Lauren found even better in value for money, as noted on the page of the recent Microsoft television commercials.




Laptop Hunters – Behind the Scenes


 


Tags: Windows 7, how to, hard disk.




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